The Bleeding of America

Thu Nov 28 17:28:13 CST 2002

>From Dana Medoro, The Bleeding of America:
Menstruation as Symbolic Economy in Pynchon, Faulkner,
and Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002),
"Introduction," pp. 1-14 ...

"'The land was ours before we were the land's,' writes
Robert Frost in 'The Gift Outright.'  A strange and
somber poem, it subtly captures a tenacious national
myth: that of America as a divinely ordained promise
to its Puritan settlers and their descendants.... 
Yet, at the same time they believed themselves
numbered among the elect, the American Puritans also
feared they were simply exiled to a wilderness
commanded by Satan.  Uncertain that America was
offered to them as a 'gift outright,' they had to
fight for proof and transform themselves into
instruments of God's implicit promise.  As Frost
claims in parentheses near the end of the poem, '(The
deed of gift was many deeds of war).' ...  If a holy
pattern secured the so-called discovery and settlement
of America, it undeniably required death as a gift or
deed from the 'land of the living.'" (pp. 1-2)

Robert Frost, "The Gift Outright" (1942)

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/vc005075.jpg

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/uc005075.jpg

   "William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain
similarly invokes and undermines the mysthological
composition of America....  'History begins for us,'
he asserts, 'with murder and enslavement.'  Neither
compact nor design lay beneath the Puritans' surmised
entitlement; the country emerged, rather, on 'the
jargon of God' ....  The Puritans left America a
legacy of violence .... 'we must go back to the
beginning; it must all be done over' ....
   "Throughout the canon of Ameican literature,
whenever a concept of national promise arises, a sense
of uncertainty or doom appears to accompany it. 
Sacvan Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad traces this
tangled thread to the Puritan sermons of colonial
America.... rhetorically transformed America into the
second site of Eden and placed it undr the prospect of
God's punishing wrath.... a Christian Isreal poised
... against the looming precedent of Sodom.... the
preachers primarily drew upon the words of the Old
Testament prophet, Jeremiah, and fused a concept of
sacred design with the events of secular history.... 
America, at once Eden and the 'Bride of Jeremiah,' was
both blessed and cursed...." (p. 2)

The Book of Jeremiah (post-586 B.C.E.)

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/RsvJere.html

And see as well ...

http://www.bartleby.com/65/je/Jerem-bk.html

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08334a.htm

   "Believing themselves outcasts and prophets, the
preachers proclaimed America's divine destiny and
denounced the 'backsliders' who obstructed its
manifestation.... the jeremiads functioned as rituals
of social coherence and vision.... a 'sacred drama of
nationhood' ...." (pp. 2-3)

"... the sermons constructed America as the site of a
cyclical return to a new beginning.... a 'New World of
regeneration' ....  Using metaphors of the garden and
exodus, of errand and tribulation, they envisioned
America as the site of spiritual rebirth .... a
'virgin wakened from her long slothful sleep into the
light of grace' ....  Furthermore, each strugle with
the forces of corruption enabled America's settlers to
reenact the cyclical movement through temptation and
disaster to renewal." (p. 3)

   "In ... The American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis likewise
illuminates a discourse of cyclical regenration in
narratives of America nationhood.  The myth of America
... rests on a fantasy of returning to Edenic
innocence.  Focusing on the canonical literature of
the American Renaissance, Lewis tracks a unified theme
of spiritual rebirth extended through representations
of an 'individual emancipated from history, happily
bereft of ancestry.  With Adam as their paradigmatic
here, writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman
set a pattern for the celebration of a prelapsarian
America.  They struggled with their Puritan legacy and
replaced its doctrine of inherited sinfulness with one
of innocence.... recurring tropes of rebirth and
periodic purification....  The fiction of the
period--Hawthorne's and Melville's, for
example--suggests, however, that the American Adam is
open to the possibility of temptation and fall...."
(p. 3 f.)

"... Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land argues that the
writers who forged the American literary tradition
borrowed the 'master symbol of the garden' from their
Puritan predecessors .... employing metaphors of
'fecundity, growth, increase' ...." (p. 4)

"... Annette Kolodny addresses the metaphors of
femininity in the myth of the New World.  In The Lay
of the Land, she maintains that America was depicted
not only as a second Eden but as a feminine Eden ....
a maternal landscape where the 'birthplace of a new
culture' could take place.  In the virgin territory's
'fertile womb' the settelers were both reborn and
confronted with the possibility of endless temptation
...." (p. 4)

"... documents express the desire to master a feminine
landscape--a landscape that 'was being experienced as
at once Mother and Virgin, with all the confusions
possible between the two' .... an inherently masculine
will to master the land coincided with a longing to be
nurtured by it." (p. 4)

"... the preachers did not perceive and configure
America as 'anthropomorphic' ... but as distinctly
feminine." (pp. 4-5)

   "In The Language of Puritan Feeling David Leverenz
.... states from the outset that he hopes 'readers
will be surprised to find how vigorously Puritan men
turned to female imagery' .... they often imagined
God's power in maternal terms.... produced a
'curiously motherly' God.  In addition, they embraced
a kind of female receptivity .... the Puritan rhetoric
constructed salvation and sin through polarized iamges
of the femal body and femininity....  America herself
shited between Jezebel and Jerusalem.  Furthermore,
purity became possible in the New World through a
promise of womb-like regeneration, and corruption
resembled menstrual blood....  The preachers called
upon their congregations to remember the sacrifice and
covenant of Christ's blood.  They set the cleansing
purity of his blood against the impurity of the body
and of women's blood, which transmitted original sin
to a child at conception....
   "Throughout many jeremiads blood functioned as a
complex symbol of defilement and purification.  On the
one hand, it combined with images of excrement and
female sexuality to describe sin; on the other hand,
it poured from Christ to heal the reprobate's sick
soul...." (pp. 5-6)

"If American literature has inherited from the Puritan
jeremiads a fascination with the American project of
beginning again in the New World, it also has taken
on, without quite being able to admit it, the unspoken
anxiety that accompanies this fantasy of rebirth. 
This 'coming face to face with original sin' ...
involves an ambivalence about facing the mark of that
sin: menstrual blood.... a tropology of menstruation
accompanies the myth of America, its vision of promise
and its sense of doom.  The future of the second
Jerusalem or Eden remains haunted by the 'curse of
Eve'; the cyclical ideal of shedding the past and
starting over conjures up the imagery or language
surrounding menstruation.... reemerges in the novels
of ... Thomas Pynchon, William Faulkner, and Toni
Morrison.  As these authors position their work within
and against the myth of America, they draw upon the
jeremiads' rhetoric and focus it through complex
representations of menstruating females.  Their novels
reveal the extent to which the foundation of American
literature has been bleeding from the start." (p. 7)

   "This study is deconstructionist in approach; it
works from the concept of Eve's curse and deconstructs
the difference between curse and cure...." (p. 8 ff.)

http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=GM2059

And see as well ...

Bercovitch, Sacvan.  The American Jeremiad.
   Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.

Kolodny, Annette.  The Lay of the Land.
   Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 1990.

Leverenz, David.  The Language of Puritan Feeling.
   New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1980.

Lewis, R.W.B.  The American Adam.
   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955. 

Smith, Henry Nash.  Virgin Land.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1950.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/home.htm

Williams, William Carlos.  In the American Grain.
   New York: New Traditions, 1968 [1925].

Not to mention ...

Medoro, Dana.  "Traces of Blood and the Matter of
   a Paraclete's Coming: The Menstrual Economy of
   Pynchon's V."  Pynchon Notes 44-45 (Spring-Fall
   1999): 14-34.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65844&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&keywords=medoro&page=1

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